Hetzner vs Selectel: Which Is Better?
We track Hetzner and Selectel prices, uptime and specs 24/7. Here's the live head-to-head for September 2026 — no paid rankings, just the data.
About HetznerHetzner is a German cloud and dedicated-server provider famous for the best price-to-performance in Europe. Where Contabo competes on raw resources, Hetzner competes on network quality, low latency and a polished API — ideal for developers running latency-sensitive workloads.
About SelectelSelectel (est. 2008, St. Petersburg) is one of Russia's largest cloud and hosting providers, serving 36,000+ customers from 6 own Tier III data centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg plus a partner DC in Novosibirsk. The catalog spans an hourly-billed cloud platform, 100+ ready dedicated servers deployed in 2 minutes, GPU systems up to 8× NVIDIA B300 HGX, VPS/VDS packages from 200 ₽/mo, colocation, managed Kubernetes & databases, S3, CDN and DDoS protection — with ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR and 152-FZ compliance.
Comparison Table
| Feature | Hetzner | Selectel |
|---|---|---|
| Price / mo | $1.86 win | $2.37 |
| Renewal price | Same as initial | — |
| Datacenters | 5 | 7 win |
| NVMe storage | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Free domain | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Backups | Paid | — |
| CDN | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Support | Ticket 1-4h | — |
| Uptime · 30d | 99.17% | 99.25% win |
Price History
Hetzner · Webhosting SCollecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Selectel · VDS 1-1-10Collecting price history — the trend fills in as we track this plan.
Uptime & Performance
Hetzner 99.17% Selectel 99.25%Pros & Cons
Hetzner- Exceptional price-to-performance — among the cheapest x86 VPS in the EU
- 99.9% uptime advertised for Hetzner Cloud (provider claim)
- Full-featured API with Terraform provider and Kubernetes support
- ARM servers (CAX) starting €3.29/mo — cheapest in Europe
- Transparent pricing — no hidden fees, no bandwidth surprises
- 5 datacenter locations: Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Ashburn, Singapore
- Support is ticket-based only — no live chat or phone
- UI/UX less polished than DigitalOcean or Vultr
- No managed databases (must self-manage)
- Limited global footprint — no APAC or LATAM DCs
- No Windows server images available
- Support response can be slow on weekends
Selectel- 6 own Tier III DCs (Moscow, St. Petersburg) + Novosibirsk partner DC
- Dedicated servers from 8,540 ₽/mo, deployed in 2 minutes, 100+ ready configs
- GPU line: B300 HGX, H200 NVL/HGX, A100, L4, RTX 6000 Pro/4090 (cloud + bare metal)
- Hourly-billed cloud with preemptible VMs and freeze option (up to 75% savings)
- Free unlimited 1 Gbps traffic on dedicated; 3 TB free on cloud VMs
- VPS/VDS from 200 ₽/mo (~$2.2) — 7 fixed NVMe/KVM configs
- No shared web hosting plans (discontinued)
- No money-back guarantee — prepaid balance model
- Cloud GPU prices published hourly only (monthly estimated at 720 h)
- International footprint limited (KZ/UZ/KE pools are regional)
- English site & docs are a subset of the Russian portal
- Colocation pricing is quote-based (no public price list)
The Verdict
On the data we track, Selectel wins more rows in the comparison table above (2 vs 1). That said, the right pick depends on which rows matter most for your use case — price, uptime, datacenters or backups.
Hetzner & Selectel alternatives
Cheaper than Hetzner / Selectel
FAQ
Right now Hetzner has the lower entry price across the plans we track. Prices update every few hours — the live snapshot above always shows the current starting price for both.
Over the last 30 days of our monitoring, Selectel had the higher measured uptime. We ping both providers every few minutes from multiple locations — see the uptime graph above.
Yes. Both run standard KVM virtualization, so you can snapshot your server, export the image, and import it on the other provider. For most stacks a fresh deploy plus a data copy is simpler.
It depends on your priority: pick the one that wins on the rows that matter most to you in the table above (price, uptime, datacenters, backups). For latency-sensitive apps favour uptime and network; for value favour price and specs.